Tag Archives: ghent

Prepare your bicycle clips! Kaffe Matthews and I are starting work on a new Bicycle Opera piece for the city of Porto, I’m working on a new mapping tool and adding some new zone types to the audio system.

While working on a BeagleBoard from one of the bikes used in the Ghent installation of ‘The swamp that was…’, I found (in true Apple/Google style) 4Mb of GPS logs, taken every 10 seconds during the 2 month festival that I forgot to turn off. Being part of a public installation (and therefore reasonably anonymised :) – this is the first 5th of the data, and about all it was possible to plot in high resolution on an online map:

The online part of the borrowed scenery project is an experiment in geotagging plants and plant related locations via a website/app called Zizim (the compass) combined with a multiplayer online game called Aniziz (the soil) where you can interact with the plants people have found. Having spent the last couple of months developing them, they are now ready for more of an open beta phase. Another part of the project is the forum here for collecting any feedback and thoughts.

Your role is to strengthen the connection between the world of Aniziz and the plants of Ghent. The plants are broadcasting messages which can only be correctly tuned into by energising them with fungi, the more plants you energise the higher your score will be.

The latest addition are specially tagged items called “pataportals” you can create with the android app which create “wormholes” in the Aniziz world. Stepping into one causes you to get sent to another one – which could be thousands of miles away. Right now Ghent is connected with the Cornish town of Penryn via a wormhole on the sea shore:

As the coder for “The swamp that was…” bike opera, my view of things was from “inside” the bikes – listening to the GPS data and playing samples. So it was super (and somewhat surreal) to finally become a rider and take one of the bikes (called Nancy) for a spin through the streets of Ghent to experience it like everyone else at the Electrified festival.

I followed the different routes, and tried some out backwards and got lost in the “garden” – the zone of mysterious ghost butterflies and wandering sounds. During the end of the final route shelter had to be sought in Julius de Vigneplein during a gigantic thunderstorm, to the sound of looping saxophones before retreating back to the Vooruit.

It didn’t crash (always my main preoccupation with testing something I’ve been involved with writing software for) and there seemed to be continuous audio from the routes. Once I had ascertained that the software seemed to be working properly I could actually start to pay attention to the sounds which were a very fluid mix, interspersed with sudden bursts of Flemish – recordings of local people.

The sounds are a widely varied mix ranging from digital glitch to ethereal sounds and processed ducks that accompany you as you cycle along the canals. The “garden” is not a route as such but occupies a maze of small streets in the Ledeberg area and populates the streets with many insects, birds and other surprises.

The custom bike/speaker arrangement designed and built by Timelab was satisfyingly loud – pulling up next to other innocent cyclists at junctions with blaring jazz is quite an intriguing social experience. It makes you want to say “I can’t turn it off” or “I am an art installation!” The beagleboards also seem fairly durable, as the bikes have been running for a month now, and the cobbled streets and some areas with bumpy roadworks give them a lot of shocks to cope with.

The “click click” of car indicator relays tell you when you’ve reached junctions where you have to turn, and while our method of calculating direction (by comparing positions every 10 seconds) doesn’t really work well enough, they still had a useful role, saying “pay attention, you need to turn here!”. This installation, and the rest of the festival will be running for another month, until the 4th November.

I spent last week working on various activities associated with the Electrified festival in Ghent, which included a mix of plant care, games dev, low level android audio hacking, beagleboard-bike fixing. Here are some photos of the Borrowed Scenery installation/physical narrative, home of the mysterious patabotanists and temporary research laboratory for FoAM – excellent for getting into the spirit of the work while developing it. More details in further posts.

The Bicycle Opera is now live, get your bikes from the Snoepwinkel, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 21:

A bicycle opera in Ghent! British sound artist Kaffe Matthews records urban sounds such as music, singing and street sounds. As she combines these with elements from the past, she creates an unseen urban opera. A mobile composition, written for cyclists. You can rent an “audio bike” to explore the streets of Ghent. As you ride past certain spots, sound recordings are played on the speakers of your bike, uncovering the soundtrack of the city piece by piece.

Here is a visualisation of the zones (including the moving ghost zones) across the city.

The main problem with the version we tested in June was that all the samples needed to be preloaded, fixing us to <512Mb total sample data. The sample loading was also extremely slow, meaning it could take up to 10 minutes after starting up till the bikes were usable. This slowness turned out to be uncompressing the ogg samples into memory on the not so fast ARM processor. Seeing as they needed to be entirely uncompressed to play anyway, there was little point in compressing them (we have no shortage of storage memory on the SD cards).
Now the zones (which link areas of the city to audio samples) are surrounded by a couple of hundred metres of loading/unloading area - crossing into this area causes the sample to start loading, exiting frees it from memory. We can now fit all samples for all the routes (collections of zones for different parts of the city) onto a single system - much more than the total memory on the boards.
Other significant improvements include a more data-driven sample playback, where zones are given a naming convention that describe if the sample needs to loop, be panned to come from a specific compass direction (based on the calculated direction of the cyclist, from GPS data) of if they need to be a special mysterious type of zone - called a "ghost zone". Ghost zones are programmed to travel across the city over time - blending between a start and end shape/position, so in the morning they might be heard in different places to the afternoon.
You'll be able to experience The swamp that was, a bicycle opera at Electrified III: The Responsive City, in Ghent from this weekend.

More work on the Borrowed Scenery project and a first screenshot, experimenting with different visual styles. I’m trying modelling clay to get a 3D look on the fungi and using Theun Karelse’s mockup characters for player avatars. The floor is being built out of map tiles of Ghent pulled from OpenStreetMap, using the OpenLayers API which has been pretty fast to get running.

A lot is changing with code too, the client graphics are now entirely HTML5 canvas, the server is running a modified version of the Germination X game, switched to using websockets and upgraded versions of all the clojure libs.